Winter of the World (96 page)

‘My grandfather, in fact. Turn it over.’

Boy read the inscription on the back. ‘Earl Fitzherbert?’ he said scornfully.

‘Yes. The previous earl, your grandfather – and mine. Daisy found that photo at T
ŷ
Gwyn.’ Lloyd took a deep breath. ‘You told Daisy that no one knows who my father
is. Well, I can tell you. It’s Earl Fitzherbert. You and I are brothers.’ He waited for Boy’s response.

Boy laughed. ‘Ridiculous!’

‘My reaction, exactly, when I was first told.’

‘Well, I must say, you have surprised me. I would have thought you could come up with something better than this absurd fantasy.’

Lloyd had been hoping the revelation would shock Boy into a different frame of mind, but so far it was not working. Nevertheless he continued to reason. ‘Come on, Boy – how unlikely
is it? Doesn’t it happen all the time in great houses? Maids are pretty, young noblemen are randy, and nature takes its course. When a baby is born, the matter is hushed up. Please
don’t pretend you had no idea such things could occur.’

‘No doubt it’s common enough.’ Boy’s confidence was shaken, but still he blustered. ‘However, lots of people pretend they have connections with the
aristocracy.’

‘Oh, please,’ Lloyd said disparagingly. ‘I don’t want connections with the aristocracy. I’m not a draper’s assistant with daydreams of grandeur. I come from a
distinguished family of socialist politicians. My maternal grandfather was one of the founders of the South Wales Miners’ Federation. The last thing I need is a wrong-side-of-the-blanket link
with a Tory peer. It’s highly embarrassing to me.’

Boy laughed again, but with less conviction. ‘
You’re
embarrassed! Talk about inverted snobbery.’

‘Inverted? I’m more likely to become prime minister than you are.’ Lloyd realized they had got into a pissing contest, which was not what he wanted. ‘Never mind
that,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to persuade you that you can’t spend the rest of your life taking revenge on me – if only because we’re brothers.’

‘I still don’t believe it,’ Boy said, putting the photo down on the side table and picking up his cigar.

‘Nor did I, at first.’ Lloyd kept trying: his whole future was at stake. ‘Then it was pointed out to me that my mother was working at T
ŷ
Gwyn when she fell pregnant; that
she had always been evasive about my father’s identity; and that shortly before I was born she somehow acquired the funds to buy a three-bedroom house in London. I confronted her with my
suspicions and she admitted the truth.’

‘This is laughable.’

‘But you know it’s true, don’t you?’

‘I know no such thing.’

‘You do, though. For the sake of our brotherhood, won’t you do the decent thing?’

‘Certainly not.’

Lloyd saw that he was not going to win. He felt downcast. Boy had the power to blight Lloyd’s life, and he was determined to use it.

He picked up the photograph and put it back in his pocket. ‘You’ll ask our father about this. You won’t be able to restrain yourself. You’ll have to find out.’

Boy made a scornful noise.

Lloyd went to the door. ‘I believe he will tell you the truth. Goodbye, Boy.’

He went out and closed the door behind him.

1943 (II)

Colonel Albert Beck got a Russian bullet in his right lung at Kharkov in March 1943. He was lucky: a field surgeon put in a chest drain and reinflated the lung, saving his
life, just. Weakened by blood loss and the almost inevitable infection, Beck was put on a train home and ended up in Carla’s hospital in Berlin.

He was a tough, wiry man in his early forties, prematurely bald, with a protruding jaw like the prow of a Viking longboat. The first time he spoke to Carla, he was drugged and feverish and
wildly indiscreet. ‘We’re losing the war,’ he said.

She was immediately alert. A discontented officer was a potential source of information. She said lightly: ‘The newspapers say we’re shortening the line on the Eastern
Front.’

He laughed scornfully. ‘That means we’re retreating.’

She continued to draw him out. ‘And Italy looks bad.’ The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini – Hitler’s greatest ally – had fallen.

‘Remember 1939, and 1940?’ Beck said nostalgically. ‘One brilliant lightning victory after another. Those were the days.’

Clearly he was not ideological, perhaps not even political. He was a normal patriotic soldier who had stopped kidding himself.

Carla led him on. ‘It can’t be true that the army is short of everything from bullets to underpants.’ This kind of mildly risky talk was not unusual in Berlin nowadays.

‘Of course we are.’ Beck was radically disinhibited but quite articulate. ‘Germany simply can’t produce as many guns and tanks as the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the
United States combined – especially when we’re being bombed constantly. And no matter how many Russians we kill, the Red Army seems to have an inexhaustible supply of new
recruits.’

‘What do you think will happen?’

‘The Nazis will never admit defeat, of course. So more people will die. Millions more, just because they’re too proud to yield. Insanity. Insanity.’ He drifted off to
sleep.

You had to be sick – or crazy – to voice such thoughts, but Carla believed that more and more people were thinking that way. Despite relentless government propaganda it was becoming
clear that Hitler was losing the war.

There had been no police investigation of the death of Joachim Koch. It had been reported in the newspaper as a road accident. Carla had got over the initial shock, but every now and again the
realization hit her that she had killed a man, and she would relive his death in her imagination. It made her shake and she had to sit down. This had happened only once when she was on duty,
fortunately, and she had passed that off as a faint due to hunger – highly plausible in wartime Berlin. Her mother was worse. Strange, that Maud had loved Joachim, weak and foolish as he was;
but there was no explaining love. Carla herself had completely misjudged Werner Franck, thinking he was strong and brave, only to learn that he was selfish and weak.

She talked to Beck a lot before he was discharged, probing to find out what kind of man he was. Once recovered, he never again spoke indiscreetly about the war. She learned that he was a career
soldier, his wife was dead, and his married daughter lived in Buenos Aires. His father had been a Berlin city councillor: he did not say for which party, so clearly it was not the Nazis or any of
their allies. He never said anything bad about Hitler, but he never said anything good either, nor did he speak disparagingly of Jews or Communists. These days that in itself was close to
insubordination.

His lung would heal, but he would never again be strong enough for active service, and he told her he was being posted to the General Staff. He could become a diamond mine of vital secrets. She
would be risking her life if she tried to recruit him – but she had to try.

She knew he would not remember their first conversation. ‘You were very candid,’ Carla told him in a low voice. There was no one nearby. ‘You said we were losing the
war.’

His eyes flashed fear. He was no longer a woozy patient in a hospital gown with stubble on his cheeks. He was washed and shaved, sitting upright in dark-blue pyjamas buttoned to the throat.
‘I suppose you’re going to report me to the Gestapo,’ he said. ‘I don’t think a man should be held to account for what he says when he’s sick and
raving.’

‘You weren’t raving,’ she said. ‘You were very clear. But I’m not going to report you to anyone.’

‘No?’

‘Because you are right.’

He was surprised. ‘Now I should report
you
.’

‘If you do, I’ll say that you insulted Hitler in your delirium, and when I threatened to report it you made up a story about me in self-defence.’

‘If I denounce you, you’ll denounce me,’ he said. ‘Stalemate.’

‘But you’re not going to denounce me,’ she said. ‘I know that, because I know you. I’ve nursed you. You’re a good man. You joined the army for love of your
country, but you hate the war and you hate the Nazis.’ She was 99 per cent sure of this.

‘It’s very dangerous to talk like that.’

‘I know.’

‘So this isn’t just a casual conversation.’

‘Correct. You said that millions of people are going to die just because the Nazis are too proud to surrender.’

‘Did I?’

‘You can help save some of those millions.’

‘How?’

Carla paused. This was where she put her life on the line. ‘Any information you have, I can pass it to the appropriate quarters.’ She held her breath. If she was wrong about Beck,
she was dead.

She read amazement in his look. He could hardly imagine that this briskly efficient young nurse was a spy. But he believed her, she could see that. He said: ‘I think I understand
you.’

She handed him a green hospital file folder, empty.

He took it. ‘What’s this for?’ he said.

‘You’re a soldier, you understand camouflage.’

He nodded. ‘You’re risking your life,’ he said, and she saw something like admiration in his eyes.

‘So are you, now.’

‘Yes,’ said Colonel Beck. ‘But I’m used to it.’

(ii)

Early in the morning, Thomas Macke took young Werner Franck to the Plötzensee Prison in the western suburb of Charlottenburg. ‘You should see this,’ he
said. ‘Then you can tell General Dorn how effective we are.’

He parked in the Königsdamm and led Werner to the rear of the main prison. They entered a room twenty-five feet long and about half as wide. Waiting there was a man dressed in a tailcoat, a
top hat and white gloves. Werner frowned at the peculiar costume. ‘This is Herr Reichhart,’ said Macke. ‘The executioner.’

Werner swallowed. ‘So we’re going to witness an execution?’

‘Yes.’

With a casual air that might have been faked, Werner said: ‘Why the fancy dress outfit?’

Macke shrugged. ‘Tradition.’

A black curtain divided the room in two. Macke drew it back to show eight hooks attached to an iron girder that ran across the ceiling.

Werner said: ‘For hanging?’

Macke nodded.

There was also a wooden table with straps for holding someone down. At one end of the table was a high device of distinctive shape. On the floor was a heavy basket.

The young lieutenant was pale. ‘A guillotine,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ said Macke. He looked at his watch. ‘We shan’t be kept waiting long.’

More men filed into the room. Several nodded in a familiar way to Macke. Speaking quietly into Werner’s ear, Macke said: ‘Regulations demand that the judges, the court officers, the
prison governor and the chaplain all attend.’

Werner swallowed. He was not liking this, Macke could see.

He was not meant to. Macke’s motive in bringing him here had nothing to do with impressing General Dorn. Macke was worried about Werner. There was something about him that did not ring
true.

Werner worked for Dorn; that was not in question. He had accompanied Dorn on a visit to Gestapo headquarters, and subsequently Dorn had written a note saying that the Berlin counter-espionage
effort was most impressive, and mentioning Macke by name. For weeks afterwards Macke had walked around in a miasma of warm pride.

But Macke could not forget Werner’s behaviour on that evening, nearly a year ago now, when they had almost caught a spy in a disused fur coat factory near the East Station. Werner had
panicked – or had he? Accidentally or otherwise, he had given the pianist enough warning to get away. Macke could not shake the suspicion that the panic had been an act, and Werner had, in
fact, been coolly and deliberately sounding the alarm.

Macke did not quite have the nerve to arrest and torture Werner. It could be done, of course, but Dorn might well kick up a fuss, and then Macke would be questioned. His boss, Superintendent
Kringelein, who did not much like him, would ask what hard evidence he had against Werner – and he had none.

But this ought to reveal the truth.

The door opened again, and two prison guards entered on either side of a young woman called Lili Markgraf.

He heard Werner gasp. ‘What’s the matter?’ Macke asked.

Werner said: ‘You didn’t tell me it was going to be a girl.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘No.’

Lili was twenty-two, Macke knew, though she looked younger. Her fair hair had been cut this morning, and it was now as short as a man’s. She was limping, and walked bent over as if she had
an abdominal injury. She wore a plain blue dress of heavy cotton with no collar, just a round neckline. Her eyes were red with crying. The guards held her arms firmly, not taking any chances.

‘This woman was denounced by a relative who found a code book hidden in her room,’ Macke said. ‘The five-digit Russian code.’

‘Why is she walking like that?’

‘The effects of interrogation. But we didn’t get anything from her.’

Werner’s face was impassive. ‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘She might have led us to other spies.’

Macke saw no sign that he was faking. ‘She knew her associate only as Heinrich – no last name – and he may have used a pseudonym anyway. I find we rarely profit by arresting
women – they don’t know enough.’

‘But at least you have her code book.’

‘For what it’s worth. They change the key word regularly, so we still face a challenge in decrypting their signals.’

‘Pity.’

One of the men cleared his throat and spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. He said he was the President of the Court, then read out the death sentence.

The guards walked Lili to the wooden table. They gave her the chance of lying on it voluntarily, but she took a step backwards, so they picked her up forcibly. She did not struggle. They laid
her face down and strapped her in.

The chaplain began a prayer.

Lili began to plead. ‘No, no,’ she said, without raising her voice. ‘No, please, let me go. Let me go.’ She spoke coherently, as if she were merely asking someone for a
favour.